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Using new domain in existing website

We have already a site and we want to make business in another country. We don't want to make a copy of our site because it requires more resources, but we want to use a different domain because the business will be run by a partner in that country. The idea is to make a folder in our site, www.mysite.com/countryname/ and associate a new domain www.newdomain.com, so when users go to the new domain they see the content under www.mysite.com/country/. Since de www.newdomain.com will use DNS redirection, the current domain won't be seen.

5 Responses

You'll be serving identical content from two different URLs, even though they're on different domains. It sounds like you'll want www.newdomain.com to do well in it's rankings in its country, and it's probably not as important that www.mysite.com/countryname/ URLs do all that well everywhere else. If that's true:

You should rel=canonical (what's that?) all URLs under www.mysite.com/countryname/ to their corresponding page in www.newdomain.com, so the pagerank will flow to those URLs under newdomain, and you won't have duplicate content issues with the search engines. Google does support cross-domain rel=canonical tags (source).

For newdomain, set up Google Webmaster Tools, and set it so you're geotargeting that country (source).

For newdomain URLs, set the Content-Language so other search engines (like Bing) can understand the geotargeting. This can be done in a variety of ways (source). We found it easiest to set it on our HTTP headers.

In fact the URL www.mysite.com/countryname/ won't be accessible from anywhere in www.mysite.com. Therefore I guess there's no need to do the canonical thing, well maybe just in case I don't do it right :-) Is this correct?

I understand that search engines won't penalize the site for creating a 'new site' from a existing one, right?

If you're not going to serve the pages from mysite.com/countryname/, then you wouldn't need to put the canonical tags on.

If you are going to serve those pages, but not link to them from within your site, you might want to add the canonical tags anyway, in case people link to the URLs under mysite.com/countryname/, so they'll pass their pagerank along. You should also disallow that directory in your robots.txt, as Google has a way of finding pages and indexing them even if they're not linked to.

I wouldn't expect you to get penalized. I thought from your original post that the Is the content between the sites different? If so you shouldn't have anything to worry about.

Many thanks Hildebrando for your quick answer. I don't want to use a 301 redirect because users won't see the new domain www.newdomain.com, instead they will see and navigate the current site www.mysite.com/countryname/. I guess I am right :-)

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